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Estimated time of infection vs. confirmed infections

Following the ideas from Tomas Pueyo's Medium post "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" [1], we assume the average time from infection to death at 23 days [2]. The data is pulled from the COVID-19 Data Repository by Johns Hopkins CSSE [3] every hour. Countries with a minimnum of 1000 confirmed cases and 40 confirmed deaths are included in this analysis.

The time from infection to death is equal to the incubation period plus the time from symptoms to death. This is used to estimate the time of the infections that lead to the observed deaths. We take the last fatality rate per country (total_cases/total_deaths) to estimate the number of infections that are responsible for the observed deaths.

In the figures below, you can observe successive waves of infections (dashed), detections (black) and deaths (red) for each country. The upper panel shows the absolute number of events. The dashed lines show the estimated number of infections. The lower panel shows the normalized number of events. Here the temporal delay between the waves and the relative change between each other can be observed.

[1] https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca

[2] https://github.com/midas-network/COVID-19/tree/master/parameter_estimates/2019_novel_coronavirus

[3] https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/tree/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series

US
Brazil
India
Mexico
United Kingdom
Italy
France
Spain
Iran
Peru
Colombia
Argentina
Russia
South Africa
Chile
Indonesia
Ecuador
Belgium
Iraq
Germany
Turkey
Canada
Bolivia
Ukraine
Netherlands
Philippines
Romania
Pakistan
Egypt
Bangladesh
Sweden
Poland
Saudi Arabia
China
Morocco
Guatemala
Czechia
Panama
Honduras
Portugal
Israel
Switzerland
Dominican Republic
Algeria
Ireland
Hungary
Kazakhstan
Moldova
Japan
Afghanistan
Kyrgyzstan
Ethiopia
Paraguay
Costa Rica
Armenia
Tunisia
Bulgaria
Burma
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Oman
Austria
Nigeria
Kenya
North Macedonia
Belarus
Nepal
El Salvador
Jordan
Australia
Libya
Sudan
Serbia
Venezuela
Kuwait
Azerbaijan
Denmark
Kosovo
Lebanon
Greece
Croatia
Uzbekistan
Albania
United Arab Emirates
West Bank and Gaza
South Korea
Cameroon
Slovenia
Finland
Zambia
Georgia
Senegal
Bahrain
Ghana
Montenegro
Congo (Kinshasa)
Angola
Norway
Malaysia
Madagascar
Qatar
Slovakia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Namibia
Cote d'Ivoire
Uganda

Ahead of the curve

Some countries start testing the population earlier in the outbreak than others. The time delay between the wave of deaths and the wave of confirmed cases is indicative for how early a country is detecting new cases ahead of the increase of deaths. Earlier detection means a better chances for successful isolation of an infected person and treatment of the desease.

We measure the distance of the maximum of cumulative deaths and new deaths to the number of infections to estimate the progression of the infection across countries.

If, in the early phase of the infection wave, the number of deaths rises faster than the number of confirmed cases, the distance drops, indicating that

A comparison of countries with respect to their mean time for reponse is presented below.

To determine the above values, we plot the number of confirmed cases (solid black lines) and the number of deaths (dashed black lines). From this, we measure the distance of the day of maximum deaths (dashed red lines) to the day of confirmed cases at this y-value.

The distance is indicative for how fast the humber of confirmed cases increases comapred to the increase of the number of deaths.

US
Brazil
India
Mexico
United Kingdom
Italy
France
Spain
Iran
Peru
Colombia
Argentina
Russia
South Africa
Chile
Indonesia
Ecuador
Belgium
Iraq
Germany
Turkey
Canada
Bolivia
Ukraine
Netherlands
Philippines
Romania
Pakistan
Egypt
Bangladesh
Sweden
Poland
Saudi Arabia
China
Morocco
Guatemala
Czechia
Panama
Honduras
Portugal
Israel
Switzerland
Dominican Republic
Algeria
Ireland
Hungary
Kazakhstan
Moldova
Japan
Afghanistan
Kyrgyzstan
Ethiopia
Paraguay
Costa Rica
Armenia
Tunisia
Bulgaria
Burma
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Oman
Austria
Nigeria
Kenya
North Macedonia
Belarus
Nepal
El Salvador
Jordan
Australia
Libya
Sudan
Serbia
Venezuela
Kuwait
Azerbaijan
Denmark
Kosovo
Lebanon
Greece
Croatia
Uzbekistan
Albania
United Arab Emirates
West Bank and Gaza
South Korea
Cameroon
Slovenia
Finland
Zambia
Georgia
Senegal
Bahrain
Ghana
Montenegro
Congo (Kinshasa)
Angola
Norway
Malaysia
Madagascar
Qatar
Slovakia
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Namibia
Cote d'Ivoire
Uganda